First Peoples in Revolution

Age of Revolutions has just finished (more or less) a series on Native Americans in the era of the American Revolution. The authors in the series wrote of efforts by the Iroquois, one of the groups most devastated by the Revolutionary War, to mitigate conflict between their own Six Nations. They studied the Chickasaws’ successful balancing of their alliance with Britain (and the vital supplies it brought) with their desire to stay out of another damaging war. They noted how the Odawas used Britain's growing demand for their military services to leverage greater material concessions from the Crown. They described how traditional masculinity, the desire to defend hunting grounds and display martial valor, drew some Cherokee men into the conflict, and how some Cherokee leaders sought to cool the tempers of warriors from the Chickamauga faction. One looked at eastern Native Americans’ efforts to mitigate the destruction of the war by shifting to a new, diversified commercial economy. One, Andrew Frank, found the Revolution a non-event from the perspective of nations like the early Seminoles.

Most of the series’ writers agree, I think, that Native Americans did not view the American Revolution as a positive good. Why would they? The rebel colonists wanted freedoms that either endangered or did not apply to American Indians: the freedom to acquire more (indigenous) land, and freedom from arbitrary, non-consensual taxation Some First Peoples did share the rebels’ distaste for the British army, the intrusive force that radicalized rural New Englanders, white Carolinians, and others as the war progressed. Few, however, trusted the Patriots enough to join force with them against that army. Those few who did generally lived “behind the frontier” in New England reserve communities, or in districts like the Catawba homeland, a capsule of southern Indians surrounded by white backcountry settlers. Indians in these regions shared at least some interests with their white neighbors. Some First Peoples also supported the rebels because they believed the alliance would bring them political advantages, or because they had personal connections to colonists that preceded the Revolution (e.g. the Oneidas). The great majority of Native Americans, however, either supported George III or stayed out of the Revolutionary War altogether.

In general, in a global context, revolutionaries don't seem to make much effort to appeal to indigenous peoples. If one is trying to overthrow a state, it makes sense to focus one's recruitment efforts on the state's constituents, on those who have to pay its taxes and obey its laws, and who also have some stake in the political community. Indigenes, who usually live independently of state authority or (all too often) live in subjugation at its margins, don't make optimal targets for revolutionary persuasion. I don't believe the First French Republic made an outreach to the Guaranis of Guyana,* for instance, nor the Bolsheviks to indigenous Siberians (at least not during the Russian Revolution), nor Mao's communists to the Miao of southwestern China. Indeed, indigenous peoples often provide fighting men to counter-revolutionary forces, as did the Senecas and Creeks in the American Revolutionary War, the Mapuches (whom my friend and colleague Pilar Herr studies) in the Chilean independence war, and the Hmong in the Second Indochina War. Incumbent regimes enjoy more familiarity with the divide-and-conquer tactics, like the use of "ethnic soldiers,"** essential to most kinds of imperial rule. Indigenous peoples, for their part, quite rightly view radical social change as more of a threat than an opportunity, particularly if Europeans introduced that change. Regrettably, their experiences after the Age of Revolution would only ratify what they had already learned.


* The First Republic's agents in the United States did try to recruit Creek and Cherokee warriors for a planned campaign against Saint Augustine, but no-one replied to their appeal. (Robert Alderson, Jr., This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions [South Carolina, 2008], 142-43, 160-61.)

** To borrow a term from Neil Whitehead. See his "Carib Ethnic Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and Antilles," Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 357-85.

Cattle, cotton, and capitalism in Indian country

Last summer the redoubtable editors of the Age of Revolutions weblog asked Your Humble Narrator to contribute a post on Native American history. I am pleased to report that my essay, "The Economic Revolution in Indian Country," is now live on the AoR site. It is part of a series that includes contributions from my friends and colleagues Karim Tiro, Kathleen DuVal, and Andrew Frank.

Had I written the piece five or seven years ago, when I first started contemplating Native American economic history, I probably would not have included my George Colbert quote, which came from my later research on the Chickasaws. I also would not have qualified my paragraph on cotton cultivation with the phrase "not found east of the Rio Grande"; I hadn't yet internalized the Pueblo Indians' pre-Columbian domestication of cotton and production of cotton cloth. It's sometimes hard for someone trained in the East, or even in the Midwest (Kentucky counts as Midwest), to recall that western Indians have a very rich history of their own prior to the nineteenth century.

The editors estimate that one can read my blog post in 11 minutes, but I suspect it will also inspire at least 66 seconds of historical musing. I always try to give 110 percent.


(The image above, "Benjamin Hawkins and the Creeks," is from the Greenville County (SC) Museum of Art, and is in the public domain.)

Performative Sovereignty and DAPL

Since 2013 I've been developing a book project on the relationship between Indian treaties and Native American sovereignty. It hasn't led to many publications yet, but last year Origins magazine asked me to write an essay on treaties, tribal sovereignty, and the NODAPL protests in North Dakota. I'm pleased to say the article is now live at this address, and I trust my readers will find it edifying.

Please Sell Me 200 Guns That Will Blow up in My Face

The early modern period brought few laurels to the American firearms industry. The best guns available in the seventeenth century were Dutch, in the eighteenth century French. Americans fought the Battle of Saratoga with French muskets and won the Battle of Yorktown with French artillery. The most innovative small arm of the Revolutionary War, the Ferguson breech-loading rifle, was a British invention. This of course did not stop Americans from building and experimenting with new kinds of weapons. As Andrew Fagal observes in a recent post on Age of Revolutions, the Atlantic Revolutionary era (ca. 1770-1830) was an age of organized violence, and one in which small or financially stressed nations struggled to maintain effective armed forces. Innovations in firepower could give revolutionary states an inexpensive "force multiplier" that would let them defend their homeland or conquer new territories for less money.

In 1792, Fagal writes, the American Joseph Chambers demonstrated to the U.S. War Department a musket that could fire eight bullets in a row without reloading. Essentially, a gun lock at the front of the barrel ignited the first powder charge, while perforations in the bullets allowed the blowback from each shot to ignite the next. This made Chambers's weapon resemble a shotgun more than a rifle; it is hard to see how one could have aimed it at multiple targets. The gun also had a tendency to burst when fired. Indeed, if one fired the repeater improperly its massive powder charge exploded and (probably) killed the gunman. 

The War Department expressed little interest in the unreliable and potentially suicidal weapon. The newer and more innovative Navy Department, however, during the War of 1812 ordered several hundred of Chambers's repeating muskets and 50 seven-barreled swivel guns. Fagal isn’t sure if the Navy ever used any of Chambers’s weapons, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. More noteworthy is the great interest that other nations showed in the new repeaters: French and Spanish diplomats and British and Dutch officers all either inquired about Chambers’ design, studied captured models, or bought a war-surplus Chambers gun or three for testing. None could effectively copy or debug the weapon, and Euro-Americans all lost interest in it by 1820. But no-one dismissed it as a useless toy developed by a backwoods dreamer, even if that's all it proved to be. 

Perhaps this episode helps explain why radical technological change often begins in the military sphere: the stakes are so high, and the benefits of even marginal improvement in efficiency so potentially great, that officials and inventors are much more willing to risk humiliation, injury, or financial ruin than civilians. 

Image of British Brown Bess musket (ca. 1720-1840) courtesy of Antique Military Rifles and Wikimedia Commons.

La Tortue Revient

My blog for H-AMINDIAN has, since my last update here, addressed the subjects of Indian slavery, land allotment, Inuit relations with the Norse and Danes, and the perennially relevant issues of sovereignty and agency. Ethnohistorians Bryan Rindfleisch and Kristalyn Shefveland have enriched the weblog, or rather some of my entries thereon, with their research findings and insights. (And Prof. Shefveland will join us with a guest post this summer.) Here's what the Turtle has been reading:

Norse and Inuit: The longue duree of Scandinavian relations with the Inuit, from the eleventh century CE to the twenty-first.

A Settler-Colonialist Interlude: Links to essays on everyone's favorite new interpretive framework, written by Bryan Rindfleisch and The Tattooed Professor.

Sovereignty in Unlikely Places: When is a land-cession treaty an assertion of indigenous sovereignty?

Mrs. Town Destroyer's Ill-Gotten Fortune: Indian slavery in colonial Virginia, and a surprising detail about the sources of Martha Washington's wealth.

Agency, Culpability, and the Fox Wars: Indian slavery and France's moral culpability for the destruction of the Mesquakies.

*

There's some exciting material coming up in the near future, including my thoughts on the Mohawk prophetess Coohcoochee and a post by Prof. Julie Reed on Cherokee institution-building.

The Turtle Crawls On

My new blog for H-AMINDIAN, the Turtle Island Examiner, has kept to a regular publishing schedule these past two months. Posts there since my last update include:

Prandial Diplomacy: Negotiation often begins and ends at the dinner table, and its outcome can prove favorable if everyone can actually digest their victuals.

Labors of Sovereignty: Yr. Hbl. Narrator's report on the 2015 American Society for Ethnohistory conference in Las Vegas. The construction of sovereignty was an important theme this year.

The Power of Space, Language, and Communication: Bryan Rindfleisch's report on the 2015 ASE conference. Ethnohistory, he concludes, is a thriving discipline.

Philanthropy as Politics: Why did the deeply-impoverished, post-Removal Cherokees and Choctaws contribute hundreds of dollars to Irish famine relief?

More to come in a couple of months, including my latest post on the Norse and the Inuit in Greenland.

(Photo of ceramic Catawba turtle by the author.)

Introducing the Turtle Island Examiner

Your Humble Narrator announces with pleasure that he has launched a new weblog at H-AMINDIAN, titled “The Turtle Island Examiner.” The blog will focus on Native American history, generally (though not exclusively) pre-twentieth century, and I intend to update it twice per month. Here are links to, and summaries of, the first four posts:

Introduction: An explanation of the blog's purpose and title

Who Your People Are: An introduction to YHN and his people, going several centuries back

Extinction Event: Dating the Anthropocene, and how post-Columbian depopulation changed the planet

Devourer of Towns: How Washington got his famous alias, for an event that happened 57 years before his own birth.

I still plan to blog here once or twice a month, though I will most likely concentrate on non-Native American history, current events, and the occasional bit of snarkiness. I hope some of my readers will also join me over at TIE, but if not I'll periodically post aggregated updates and links to Examiner posts here at Stranger Things.

Guest Post: The Battle of Actium

Courtesy of my talented sister Corinna Nichols, a student of ancient Near Eastern languages (and, in a previous life, of Greek and Latin), I am pleased to present a short poem on the Battle of Actium, a familiar subject to fans of Roman history and anyone who made it at least 15 minutes into I, Claudius:

**

The battle for the Roman world
Came down to boy meets boy meets girl:
Antonius, Caesar’s magister,
Was mired in a love affair
With Cleopatra Philopater
(Who also was his children’s mater).

He picked a very foolish fight--
In truth he wasn’t very bright.
He challenged young Octavian
Agrippa, and his navy and
Then with his queen began a battle
With ships stuffed full of sails and chattel.

Thus the once-triumvirate
Their ships with weapons aristate (1),
Met and clashed in mighty fracas
Rome v. posse comitatus,
Led by M. Vipsan. Agrippa
Naval whiz and valiant skipper. (2)

For Cleo and Marc Antony
There would be no amnesty;
In manner most Shakespearian
(Some would say, ophidian)
They shuffled off their mortal coils
Leaving Rome with all the spoils.

Octavian had won the Nile,
Its grain, its every crocodile;
And though the war was slightly civil
No one raised the smallest cavil
Octavian, in fact of matter
Was made a triple triumphator.

And so that day at Actium
Augustus won imperium.
Like a less depressed Aeneas,
(Devoid of any thought impious)
He gave the world the Pax Romana
In truth, Memento Augustana (2).

For more of the learned Mme. Nichols's work, check out her blog, Of a Number of Things.
**

(1) Bristling. No, I'd never heard it before, either.
(2) Okay, this is awesome.
(3) Author's note: accusative neuter plural, in case you were wondering.

Blogroll update

I have finally retired the link to the Orwell Diaries from my blogroll, as the site editors have posted the last entry from G.O.'s wartime journal.  Orwell went to work for the B.B.C.* in late 1942, and did not resume keeping a diary until 1946 (and his postwar diary focused almost exclusively on trivia).  It's been fun following his account of World War Two.

Replacing Mssr. Blair is a link to a new weblog put together by a group of graduate students and recent Ph.Ds in early American history, The Junto.  The site launched a couple of weeks ago, and already the authors have published several excellent articles on Jay Gitlin's Bourgeois Empire, the communitarianism of the Founding Fathers, the best history books of 2012, and other subjects.  I look forward to following their exploits.

Your humble narrator has also been alerted to this list of the 50 best American history blogs, in which his humble site appears as number 45.  Huzzah!**

Updated Update, 4 January 2013: Allow me to introduce my readers to "Baby Got Bactria," Briana Kristler's research blog on commerce, law, and architecture in pre-modern Balkh (Bactria).  Really, how could one not support a weblog with that title?


* If memory serves, the B.B.C.'s headquarters was the architectural model for the Ministry of Truth in 1984, and one of the conference rooms where Orwell's section met was Room 101.


** Pronounced "hoozay."  Really!

An Empire, If You Can Define It

My friend Sydney Freedberg and I recently had an exchange on his website about the definition of the word "empire," and whether it properly applied to the United States. (This was apropos of an interview Sydney did with a Romanian news site on the NATO campaign in Libya.) Sydney defines an empire as a state with a "politically dominant, culturally distinct group" living in a core territory, and at least one ethnically distinct peripheral group with limited political rights. By this definition, the U.S. was an actual empire from 1898 to 1946, during its period of formal rule over the Philippines and establishment of protectorates over several Caribbean and Central American republics.

I think it's useful to have a limited definition of empire, if only because the term has become so widely and pejoratively used in the early twenty-first century as to lose its meaning. I would only add two caveats here. The first is that "empire" wasn't always pejorative; during the eighteenth century, for instance, it could merely mean "a large territorial state." As Peter Onuf points out in Jefferson's Empire (U. of Virginia Press, 2001, pp. 53-79) the first leaders of the American national republic frequently referred to the United States as an "empire." Indeed, Federalists discovered it was more politically useful to call the U.S. an "empire" than a "nation," since the latter implied that they wanted to create a consolidated national government (as their Anti-Federalist critics claimed).

The second caveat is that under Sydney's definition, the interstellar Empire in the original STAR WARS movies wasn't an empire, unless you count the Stormtroopers as the "core" ethnic group. Pretty much everyone else was an oppressed peripheral group. (In the prequel films, there was only one consistently oppressed subject race: the audience.)

Some Weblogs Are More Equal Than Others

It's apparently never too late to start a weblog. George Orwell, for instance, has just begun his own blog, even though he died nearly sixty years ago. Chances are, though, that he won't be linking back to mine.

(The Orwell Diaries weblog, sponsored by the Orwell Prize, will consist of entries from Orwell's daily diaries of 1938-42, encompassing his sojourn in Morocco and the early years of World War Two. Each entry will be posted exactly 70 years after Orwell wrote it.)